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The Spill Awards 2012

Why haven’t I been nominated for a Spill Award this year?

Okay, I’m going to interpret two “sorry too busy” and one “it wouldn’t be the same without you” comments as a ringing endorsement of my stewardship of the annual Spill Awards, and put my mind to thinking of a way to top last year’s live blog of the award ceremony. I suppose we could do it on Twitter… If anyone has any thoughts, let me know; meanwhile, it’s time to open nominations. Here’s how it works…

(1) Send your nominations in the different categories (see below) to me via email, at abahachi(at)hotmail.co.uk, by 15th December.

(2) I will put together shortlists of those nominations that receive the most (or any) support, and create polls for you all to vote for your favourites.

(3) Voting will run up to Christmas, and the award ceremony will then take place on the evening of Friday 28th December, unless I get lots of loud objections and alternative suggestions.

The Categories

Album of the Year Must have been released in 2012, or at the very end of 2011 (so too late to be considered last year). Please suggest up to ten, and bear in mind that only albums that are supported by more than one person will stand a chance. We have so many opportunities to showcase our individual eclecticism; this is where we try to find out how much, if at all, our tastes overlap, and how far we can differentiate ourselves from the Grauniad’s official list.

Film of the Year Again, films released in 2012 are eligible. Please suggest up to five.

TV Programme of the Year Please suggest up to five.

Hero of the Year Please suggest up to five, if you can.

Villain of the Year Please limit yourself to five.

Event of the Year Again, up to five suggestions would be good.

Special Awards If you would like to nominate anyone for an additional award of your own devising, or alternatively would like to be considered for such an award, just let me know, with a short encomium or acceptance speech as appropriate.

I propose removing the categories of Book of the Year, Rediscovery of the Year and Sadly Missed, as suggestions received have always been even more random and eclectic than for the other categories, and it’s impossible to put together a sensible shortlist. Rather, I would suggest having separate posts in which we can recommend books to one another, mull over all the great musicians who’ve died over the year and talk about older music that we’ve discovered or rediscovered. If I have time, I’ll try to do such posts, but anyone else should feel free to do it.

I’m really sad that the 12″ hardback is soooo expensive. It came out lovely, it did; but that’s the sort of price you pay for for print-on-demand publishing. Mind you, I am in possesion of a 25% off voucher, which makes it a bit more reasonable.

I did notice on facebook – it is amazing how beautiful individual books can be produced now.
While the Scotland theme was on, I was creating different books as presents for the in-laws, based on my Photo’s from Arran and another of Hadrian’s wall. It is SO much fun. But I had massive 75% voucher discounts for me to afford them … In reality it’s not that expensive for a unique book – but it’s hard to get others to stump up.

I’ve been trying to convince a lego obsessed dad at school to buy one of your books – trouble is his wife is vetoing him buying ‘himself’ any more presents and she wont feed his obsession .. (and I can’t push too hard as he’s been demanding t-shirts as presents for me to design – and I really need the work)…

I want to set up a book printing collective one day – but it will have to wait – because I have a Christmas fair on Saturday – and I’d need some business sense and it would involve talking to people… not my strong points…

I missed the whole thing last year because I didn’t really understand what was going on, but the next-day rave reviews made me realize that I had missed something really special.

I don’t watch TV and rarely films so can’t contribute there. Are hero’s and villains tv/film types or can we include politicians and Guardian comments programmers, for example?

If you’re removing categories, can I make a suggestion if you’re not trying to ease the workload? Perhaps adding one for Music Blog of the Year, or something along those lines? I think it might be worthwhile to do inventory of the best of the blogs. Actually, that might be a whole new annual thing, possibly.

Heroes and villains have traditionally been politicians, and people who mess about with the RR comments function, so don’t worry about.

The reason for removing some categories wasn’t workload but simply that they didn’t work for voting purposes – it’s hard enough to produce a list of ten albums that more than one person on the Spill named as something they liked, so calls for nominations for books or anything like that (and I suspect blogs would be in the same category) produced extremely long lists of things, each of which had only one vote each. A separate post from someone on ‘best of the blogs’ would be great, but since this is pretty well the only music blog I follow I think I’ll leave that to someone else…

The positive aspect of the whole thing, like the Festive Spill, is that I get to find out all the exciting things that have been happening in music this year that I might actually like, whereas I read the Grauniad’s Album of the Year lists and just feel old and jaded. So far, in the countdown from 40 to 11, I’ve only heard of 13 of the artists, and most of them I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole; of the three of those albums I’ve actually listened to, one was rubbish and the other two were okay but scarcely compared with past glories. Ho hum.

No, the point is that there will be a Sadly Missed, but not as a category for people to vote on, (a) because that’s a bit creepy and (b) because we can never remotely agree on whom we miss the most. I’ll put up blog posts on this, book of the year, rediscovery of the year and similar things in the run-up to the award ceremony, if no one else gets there first – please do, if you feel at all like it, ‘cos I do actually have work to do occasionally, not least writing the Book of the Year for 2014…